Regeln » Wins and losses used to mean something, even when

they didn't lead to a World Series title. There were financial reasons: Teams that finished in the "first division," in the top half of the league, got a share of the postseason revenue, small amounts but significant bonuses to http://www.officialsbuccaneersprostore.com/J_R_Sweezy_Jersey_Cheap modest salaries. (On the final day of the 1933 season, Wally Berger hit what came to be known as the $10,000 Home Run, Jordan Mills Youth jersey which pushed his Boston Braves into fourth place -- into the money.)

But there were also spiritual reasons. A team that won more games than it had the previous season seemed to have an improving outlook, regardless of whether there were prospects on the farm or draft picks on the way. "Connie Mack is said to have preferred a second-place finish over a pennant," says John Thorn, Major League Baseball's official historian. "The fans would come out with great hope for the following year instead of suffering from the complacency that comes with expectation."
When Billy Beane was turning around the A's in the late 1990s, he did it without tearing the club down to its bolts. "We were just trying to avoid losing 100 games," manager Art Howe said, as quoted in Glenn Dickey's book Champions. "I'd been in that situation before in Houston, and it's ugly. ... [Fans] expect you to keep winning, no matter what." If wins and losses counted, how much did they count? Around 2000, when sabermetric writers were expanding the scope of their writing -- to player health, team finances, coaching techniques, psychology -- they began to wonder.
In 2002, at Baseball Prospectus, Jonah Keri wrote his first professional baseball article, under the headline "The Success Cycle: Making the Hard Decisions." It argued that teams are all contending, building or rebuilding, and strategy should match the different incentives at each stage. The most important sentence in the piece would anticipate what the Astros, 76ers and Browns would attempt a decade later: "A team rebuilding has to go all the way with the process; failing to commit is a recipe for disaster."
In the next few years, writers would put data to work defining the value (in team revenue, Hayes Pullard Jersey usually) of each win -- and, by extension, each loss. In 2006, in Baseball Between the Numbers, Nate Silver showed that a team's 90th win was worth six times as much as its 78th -- and that, in fact, until a team surpasses 80 victories, there is almost no value in winning additional games at all.
Suddenly, teams that once saw value in pushing for a .500 record and competitive (if futile) September games saw far more in high draft picks and low payroll. After then-Devil Rays manager Lou Piniella criticized the team for being too future-focused -- "They're not interested in the present" -- http://www.minnesotawildofficialonline.com/Adidas-Jared-Spurgeon-Jersey his replacement, Joe Maddon, endorsed the multiyear rebuild. "That doesn't bother me because I know what we're doing is proper," Maddon said after losing 101 and 96 games in his first two seasons. After the 2008 season, even Boras -- Scott Boras! -- was using the language of the success cycle. "I went to [Nationals owner] Ted Lerner after the 2008 season, when he wanted to sign [Mark] Teixeira, and said, 'Don't make a bid for him,'" he told me in 2016. "'Your organization is terrible. The best thing you can do is continue to be terrible.'" The Nationals didn't sign Teixeira. They ended up instead losing 103 games and signing Boras' client Bryce Harper, the first pick in the 2010 draft.
After the Marlins' 2012 fire sale -- a scandal, given the Marlins' history of bait-and-switches with fans and taxpayers -- FanGraphs ran one approving article headlined "The Marlins Are a Well-Run Company." In 2015, ESPN's FiveThirtyEight argued that all but nine teams should have been sellers at that year's trade deadline -- in a league in which 10 teams make the playoffs.
As a strategy, teams' willingness to hit rock bottom was soon vindicated. In 2011, the Royals came to camp with the Darin Erstad Youth jersey lowest payroll in baseball, nearly halved from the previous year. Sports Illustrated's Joe Posnanski wrote a piece from "the future," imagining how the Royals had used The Process -- GM Dayton Moore's mocked term for the club's long rebuild -- to win the 2015 World Series. And they did, right on schedule! So too did the Astros, who famously made SI's prognostic 2014 cover -- "Your 2017 World Series Champs" -- come true. In between, Theo Epstein's Cubs won it, after Epstein first guided them into the worst back-to-back complete seasons in franchise history.
Where Branch Rickey's gambit had been a stain on his record, Epstein's made him a Chicago hero and all but assured he'll someday be enshrined in baseball's Hall of Fame. Baseball games no longer exist in the moment; they count only as dots in a process. Their outcomes are often irrelevant, and sometimes inverted -- defeat might help more than victory. A successfully rebuilding team is like a chess player whose strategy was to take a bunch of the pieces, put them in his pocket and then start the next game with two queens and four rooks. A GM can build the worst team in baseball for years running and somehow improve his reputation.
Perhaps the most crucial difference between the reception to Rickey's machinations and Epstein's? After sabermetricians made the case for the "five-year plan" as a strategy, fans -- not all of them, but plenty -- embraced it as a philosophy. Losing no longer counts as losing; it is a vehicle for hope. A fan base might turn away from a 100-loss season -- the Astros famously drew 0.0 TV ratings in some games -- but it will loyally come back when the club's ambitions do. (Even three years before they won the World Series, the Astros sold T-shirts that said, in team colors, "Process.") wholesale jerseys wholesale jerseys from china cheap jerseys wholesale nfl jerseys wholesale nfl jerseys